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Comment by justforasingle | Hacker News Reader

Pretty interesting. If you look on netflix approved camera list[0] there are none from Nikon. Personally I think RED cameras are overhyped and are a major reason most netflix shows all look and feel the same. I don't think its the colour grading or lenses - its something about the camera itself that just feels shit and doesn't give me the same access to a scene the same way something like sony's HDVS from 30 years ago does.[1]

[0] https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63flkf3S1bE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW26YMe8iUQ

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Red cameras are overhyped, but picture quality is not the issue. It is very likely that what you describe is more due stylistic differences in lighting, color grading and editing than due to the camera itself — coming from someone who professionally had to match colors on films shot on multiple different cameras on more than one occasion.

Reliability is the main reason why Red cameras are overhyped, but you get good pictures and specs for the price, just like with black magic cameras but a notch higher. Most DOPs I know would go fo ARRI if given free choice.

As a photographer I know next to nothing about film, let alone cinema. Hence the question, is ARRI gear really as good as people say, and as expensive?

The thing about ARRI is, yeah their gear is expensive, but it is just an incredible combination of good design and stellar engineering. Their cameras are surprisingly straightforward to use, definitely easier than a RED or Sony (with their "every-surface-needs-to-be-covered-in-buttons-but-few-are-where-you-would-expect-them"-mentality).

Their light gear is just stellar. I have seen ARRI HMI lamps that took 40 years of beatings and still worked flawlessly.

The thing is, sure ARRI is expensive, but depending on your production losing a day might be more expensive than buying a whole new camera.

Generally my experience is that a lot of the price of high end gear goes towards reliability, this is true for most other fields of tech as well.

Thanks! Totally get the point of price being relative. After all, if you use gear professionally, as in earning money with it, the calculation of cost is different.

Edit: Nikon is generally doing a decent job on those "pro" aspects if cameras, ergonomics, buttons, reliability and so on. Should be interesting to see how this acquisition plays out.

> The thing is, sure ARRI is expensive, but depending on your production losing a day might be more expensive than buying a whole new camera.

This is generally true when purchasing equipment for personnel. If you have to purchase three new €2500 family MacBooks because of a burst pipe, that’s mighty expensive. Even for a small IT company, that’s just half a month’s wage per developer.

I know that with expensive camera gear we’re talking about €250 000 per camera or whatever, but you rent those.

> Generally my experience is that a lot of the price of high end gear goes towards reliability, this is true for most other fields of tech as well.

Great point. I have this in non-professional settings the first question people ask is why this stuff is so expensive. Because if things work with little bit of fidgeting that's good enough.

When folks talk about reliability of these cameras, what are we talking about? Like, the camera longevity, or ruggedness? Or like they reliably produce a consistent output, versus producing different results under the same conditions where one would expect consistency?

Speaking for lighting: all of it. ARRI stuff is expensive AF but worth every penny if you have the need for it.

Is this different in some way from the still photo world where you have like Broncolor that’s unreasonably expensive and no one can explain why?

In the end it's reproducibility for both - you know that when you have a specific setup, it will look exactly the same.

Broncolor is expensive just because they're old and entrenched, and some people are always in the mindset that more expensive must equal better.

If reliability is a concern, you can easily buy multiple Godox units of approximately the same specifications (or better) for the same price as one Broncolor.

> If reliability is a concern, you can easily buy multiple Godox units of approximately the same specifications (or better) for the same price as one Broncolor.

I got burned enough, once even literally, by cheap Chinese speedlights that I am now a firm subscriber to the philosophy of "buy once, cry once".

Broncolor is “buy once, cry once, then cry again when you need an attachment, and also cry when you need to replace a bulb.”

I mean, a Godox V1 is $200. The Profoto A1 is $1,100. They're very comparable apart from price. I have 6 Godox speedlights of different tiers and only one broke, apart from some screws that just needed to have some Loctite put on them (which they fixed with later models).

Obviously don't go for the $30 plastic wonders.

In my judgment ARRI fixtures are not unreasonably expensive. Yeah they are pricey, but you get what you pay for, the engineering, including the elctrical engineering is stellar, the reproducability amazing.

Now whether you actually need those things is another question, but my opinion on ARRIs stuff is that it costs exactly what I would expect it to cost on that level of quality (and that isn't true for all manufacturers).

I work as a director of photography and own an Alexa Mini.

Reliability in this context means that the camera will record and the footage will not be corrupted on the media.

Film sets are very rough on equipment and things break all the time. Sometimes one films in very harsh conditions that anre either very cold or very dusty and hot. Often you don’t have the luxury of being able to repeat a moment or you have travelled to very remote locations so having gear that will continue to work is worth paying a huge premium for.

The Arri sensors and imaging pipeline also offer the best overall image quality. This means it can handle very high dynamic range scenes better than all other cameras. For example the new Alexa35 sensor can record 11f stops of information above middle grey. Most prosumer video cameras can record above and below middle grey around 12 stops total with most of the information in the shadows.

It also means consistent image quality in different shooting environments. Arri has very sophisticated cooling to keep the camera sensor within a specified temperature for consistent noise performance.

Because Arri make more than just cameras it also means that the camera fits into the whole professional eco system and synergises with other pieces of filmmaking equipment like the Arri wireless focus systems, camera remote heads etc etc. Meaning you can focus on the hard bit which is creating amazing stories.

Thank you, this was exactly the sort of elaboration I was looking for.

The Alexa does not have 11 stops of info above middle grey. More like 6-7 at most.

I 100% agree on the correlation of price and reliability in the professional video world. My experience is in live event production and while Blackmagic has revolutionized the accessibility of high-quality production it does come with a non-dollar price. I've never had a Ross router, switcher, or other auxiliary gear go down during a show. I have experienced multiple show stopping failures of Blackmagic devices. I once was on a show where the BM router locked up fight before showtime. Doors were open and power cycling was not an option. All existing routes were passing signal just fine, it was just control that was gone. We just had to make do for the event, fortunately there were no critical audience facing changes that we needed.

For some clients the savings are worth the risk. For others they absolutely are not. With live you get no chance to shoot it on another day or go back and fix it in post. If there's thousands of people outside the room watching you better make sure that signal chain is rock solid.

After spending my career in supply chain and logistics, I am now at the interface of design and support for complex systems. So, reliability, or rather the full Reliability-Availability-Maintainability-Testability-Supportability, RAMT(S), is really important for my work.

It is quite fascinating, that besides the overall performance and capabilities of a system, pros care about RAMT a lot. Regardless of the field. Nice to see that confirmed, in yet another field I knew next to nothing about.

FWIW "every surface needs to be covered in buttons" is exactly how a Canon person™ once explained to me why they are not a Nikon person. So that checks out wrt this acquisition, at least.

The only thing more hilarious than the pointless Canon vs. Nikon quabble are when you throw in Leica shooters into the mix.

Are there any? I think 99.9% of them are Leica “owners” rather than “shooters”. You can’t even properly manually focus on a 60mp sensor with a rangefinder.

I think we shouldn't go there! ;-)

I'm a Nikon person™ because my Canon printer once refused to scan because it was out of yellow... When it came time to buy a DSLR I chose Nikon and honestly I haven't been disappointed.

Probably reproducibility and consistency.

In terms of the image, I think a big advantage Arri cameras have is a patent on simultaneous dual gain sensors. Perhaps somebody will tell me I've misunderstood that though.

Aside from that, I think a lot of what you pay for is reliability, support and general non-sketchiness, which are not areas where RED have a particularly good reputation.

ARRI cameras have much better IR filters in front of the sensor. RED IR filters were horrible quality when we measured them, leading to worse image quality.

Yup, precisely why comparing "stops" doesn't tell the whole story.

The Bayer color array also makes an enormous difference (and is unique to each manufacturer). Good ones are NOT cheap to make.

I worked with ARRI for a few years when they were working on the predecessor to the ARRI Alexa, called the D-20. That was already an awesome camera but they didn't really take it into production because they wanted to make it simpler, easier to use and basically "better". They could've shipped, but they waited multiple years because they wanted their flagship digital camera to live up to their reputation. It's extremely well-deserved.

ARRI has a specific look and almost perfect directly out of the camera. Compare it to Red or Sony Venice and you see that it is the most appealing. You can make other cameras look like it, but ARRI is just industry standard and produces amazing colors. Their sensor is just fantastic.

Is it the sensor? I though it was the processing.

Yes. But No.

Red V-Raptor S35 XL has 16.5 stops of dynamic range with 250-12,800 ISO. ARRI Alexa 35 has 17 stops of range with 160-6400 ISO. Both use rolling shutters, both have native ISO of 800. Alexa has better low light noise reduction at higher ISO, but Alexa is sharper and has better dynamic range in low light since it uses 8K to 4K down sampling.

The real difference is in the colour straight out of the chip and how the workflow is for DIT on set.

THe major difference I think is that Arri is already easy to use and slots in to the Hollywood human knowledge base and workflows while RED was mostly used by indie filmmakers, documentarians, Youtubers, and Silicon valley people (if you work at Apple in the US you can buy RED cameras cheaply through company benefits). This pretty much created a different culture of what images should look like around the two cameras. an Alexa camera sets you back close to 80K and a fully equiped RED sets you back about 44K. So its easier to buy it and use it while hollywood rents it on the day for the shoots.

You can get a RED to look like it was shot on Alexa and vice versa in post processing today, but the people who work with the different cameras have different cultures of what is "cinematic" image.

btw this is a good comparison https://wolfcrow.com/red-v-raptor-s35-xl-vs-arri-alexa-35-wh...

You can’t compare the spec sheets. You need to look at the over and under tests. There is no camera close to the Alexa35 in dynamic range

Yes, and it's worth every penny.

Red were kinda the Tesla of the film camera world. New name, new tech, new price point, fashionable branding Vs existing long established players.

Thing is ARRI pivoted and covered the new tech pretty well, and had the existing business links into the rental market allowed them to continue unflustered. Red got the layman hype because they seemed to make high quality available to more people at an achievable (but still high) price point. The industry didn't really care though. They rent cameras, not buy them and they were already affording the old stuff.

RED does have a nice image pipeline, and some neat stuff like the Komodo. Wish I still had the spare change to get one.

I've seen a handful on my local FB marketplace lately (nowhere near Hollywood or anywhere that you'd expect to see them) but ~$5k for a Epic-X Dragon with a lens.

5k for an EPIC-X? Wild. Good thing that that's not local to me, or my bank account would be complaining.

The killer would be a Komodo. Global shutter and autofocus is amazing in something that price.

Lol - one posted within range of my search - listed at $6,500 but I bet you could talk them down:

Red Komodo 6k

SmallHD indie 7 with Red control

Red outrigger Handle

2 512GB cards

2 Canon BP-995

4 Jupio BP-975

2 NEO Mini 98wh

SmallRig Handle

BP battery charger

CFast 2.0 card reader

Core SWX Battery Plate

That sounds amazing. Please stop before my wife finds out I'm even thinking about this.

I don't even make movies but the Red reputation + general deviant behavior in terms of buying unnecessary tech makes this a dangerous search on my part too. Wish the FB algorithm would stop recommending them (though not enough to manually tell it not to....)

I got a Komodo a few months ago in LA area for $3500 used with multiple cards and gold mount batteries, outrigger handle, pl mount adapter, etc. They’re out there, a lot of people upgrading to the X.

ARRI also has their own "picture style", at least the ARRI Alexa. I remember seeing video on YT where the guy bought a really old ARRI Alexa that was used in Hollywood back in 05 or 06. When they showed some of the footage they took with it, it looked exactly like an mid-2000's big screen movie, I honestly didn't realize those movies even had a "look" until I saw his video.

Do you mean the D20? The Alexa wasn't released until 2010

Most movies in 2005 were film. So the style in 2005 was the film look. Collateral (2004) was the first major movie shot on video and it's got a very different look and the tech was so new, Tom Cruise had to wear a certain shade of gray suite so as to not blow the highlights in some of the scenes.

https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/thomson-grass-valleys-vipe...

> I remember seeing video on YT where the guy bought a really old ARRI Alexa that was used in Hollywood back in 05 or 06. When they showed some of the footage they took with it, it looked exactly like an mid-2000's big screen movie, I honestly didn't realize those movies even had a "look" until I saw his video.

Is this the video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hahBgDUESjE

that's the one!

I suppose this is another illustration of "defaults are powerful"

This. RED cameras are overhyped for a few reasons:

- They were once the "hot startup" promising acceptable resolution (filmic 4K when nobody needed it, everything was 2K at most). But they oversold resolution at the cost of bizarrely slow-to-decompress proprietary RAW format and some loss to image quality, and stayed true to that. Arri came to market later and they did the right thing - picked convenience and stability over super-duper-extra-super-high-res. - Their cameras would routinely overheat - Cameras would have severe reliability issues with software updates - Some haptics/controls felt wanky at times - They wanted hard to sell you "just the body", for "cheap cheap cheap", but it meant that to have something usable you would need the whole loadout - which would ship in pieces, with periods of delay for availability, and the quality of some components would be meh. Want an EVF? Wait 2 years for one to ship. Want functioning grip? Separate. Want etc. etc.? Separate. I.e. they were very inviting to "now you, as a DOP, can finally own a camera", but owning "the camera and the kit required for it - sans lenses" would be a painful proposition.

This was certainly the case in 2006-2010s, dunno if it has gotten much better lately. It does seem that RED kept to the theme of severely overselling their users extreme picture resolutions, at the cost of having the files super-painful to process, proprietary codecs, and lackings in other areas such as dynamic range.

Any RAW image that comes out of a modern digital sensor can be made to look like anything else, as Steve Yedlin thoroughly demonstrated. They look the same because they are lit, edited and color graded the same

> as Steve Yedlin thoroughly demonstrated

I'm interested in this, do you have a link?

Some Yedlin links. I found his process to be methodical, precise, thorough and definitive. The question as to whether there is any perceptible visual difference between film and video that has been post-produced by an expert was definitively answered for me.

Resolution Demos: https://www.yedlin.net/ResDemo/index.html

On Color Science for Filmmakers: https://www.yedlin.net/OnColorScience/index.html

Pet peeve, by why do people persist in using wide aperture closeups to test resolution? If almost everything in the frame is out of focus, then duh, you're not going to notice much difference between 'high resolution' and 'very high resolution'.

past f8 on full frame (and wider on smaller frames) you run into diffraction, so you actually do get more detail with a slightly wider aperture. i only glanced at the links but it seems about right.

also, everyone knows what a face looks like

Sure, but why not shoot a subject at infinity? (I said "wide aperture closeups".) It's hard to even know which tiny part of the face is actually in perfect focus. And at the resolutions tested, you will need perfect focus to see any difference.

Yep. This is the correct answer to OP.

No, why “everything looks the same” is 100% down to lens, lighting and grading choices.

Part of it is that modern lenses are incredibly accurate and much better technically than they used to be - a lot of the movies that people praise the photography of are now using vintage lenses that are 30-50 years old modified to modern lens mounts, since they have “visual character” instead of being so clean.

> a lot of the movies that people praise the photography of are now using vintage lenses that are 30-50 years old modified to modern lens mounts

Isn't this confounded by who chooses to buck the trend? IMO, it's the very skilled DPs who are not only skilled, have earned enough social capital to experiment and have excellent reasons for using old soviet lenses, or lenses designed for use on the moon or some other exotic origin story. This self-selecting bunch are likely to produce outstanding work regardless of the equipment.

I don't know how old you are, but as a younger millennial these look pretty awful to me (no disrespect). I'm sure nostalgia plays a part. I feel the same way about videos/sci-fi shows from the 2000s - none of the modern stuff quite feels the same.

But as another commenter said, I don't think it's the camera itself - it's the stylistic changes in lighting, camera angles, direction, etc. Each decade has a distinct 'feel' - films/shows in the 80s don't feel like the 90s, or the 2000s like the 2010s, etc.

It seems to be too much now to me. Overproduced maybe is the word? Too vibrant of coloration, too much lighting, too much movement. The best way I can put it is that new shows and movies feel "plastic" compared to older stuff.

I think it’s called the Netflix look. If you look it up you get several discussions on color grading and other matters.

That's because Nikon don't have a cinema line of cameras, and the cameras they do have have only very recently added support for higher-end video features like log and ProRes RAW support.

The RED cameras are perfectly capable of delivering great picture quality and good color science. The "Netflix look" doesn't come from cameras, but from the fact that everything in their cheaper productions is rushed, including the color grading.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire for instance, was shot on RED cameras at 8K. And it's one of the most beautiful digital films ever made, IMO.

I loved that movie! It truly is gorgeous, right up there with Blade Runner IMO. I just wish they'd release it in 4k, I'd re-buy it in a heartbeat.

Maybe that's nostalgia.. I personally think the clips you shared look awful compared to any modern camera.

I seriously doubt the average person notices any difference between RED cameras and any other modern camera with roughly the same properties.

Not maybe, movies are simply shot in different ways, people expect different things. Nothing in this world is static.

Now its perfectly fine to dislike 'modern' approach, but in digital era that has absolutely nothing to do with some lens/sensor combo and everything how director decides given scene or whole movie should 'feel'.

Yeah Netflix definitely has a directing "style" across lots of its shows. Two things I've noticed are lots of shaky-cam shot as though someone's spying on the scene, when it's just the camera; and often a top down view from high up with loads of detail to showcase some visually impressive event, in mild slow-mo.

When the hammer is invented, of course you will be eager to solve problems that look like nails. I feel like this happened after quadcopters got good.

You can tell the difference between RED and other camera makers just by checking the black levels (because RED has horrid IR filtering and so you get a bit of picture greying.)

It's really noticeable when you fire off a DPSS LASER at 532nm. You can see both the IR beam and the converted visible light beam, making the LASER appear a weird green-purple color.

For the 1990s, that Sony demo video looks amazing. The colors pop, skin pores are visible, brush strokes are visible! The colors and styles are very 90s, but it was the 90s so things are expected to look that way.

I think you are mistaking stylistic choices for something technical.

Netflix shows look and feel the same because they are shovelware, produced to look and feel the same. This is part of why they have style guides and approved equipment lists, but as far as the sensors are concerned -- any modern sensor is up to the task.

There are no Nikon video cameras on the list because Nikon does not make video cameras, although I guess now they do.

Watching all that Sony stuff.

Part of what's giving you that effect is not the resolution, or color accuracy etc: it's that you're looking at what is really a very primitive system. It's the analog vs. digital all over again, but with video. More than that, it's compressed video, versus a more immediate but more primitive analog system. What I'm seeing of RED suggests it's all about sensor resolutions, but compression is always a point of contention and color space is an issue.

If you're digitally compressing data like this and running into an area where there are challenges, you're running into areas where the algorithms get twitchy: they're designed to optimize for certain things and you can throw pathological image sequences, pathological colors, at them.

Some of the challenges inherent in getting really high sensor resolution out of a RED are irrelevant to old Sony analog HD camera technology, apples and oranges.

Color grading always changes the colors in post anyway. Film movies often looks better than digital to my eyes but i think that is at least partly because color grading did not exist like it does now and there was no push to make every object "pop" by being oversaturated. To me, Film is more likely to give you a single scene in each frame while color graded digital movies often seem to be made of several disparate scenes cobbled together. Movies from the past used less greenscreening in favor of matte paintings which were often included in the scene they were used itself rather than edited in or they were the only shot in the scene. You can make digital film look however you want, even to look like film, but most Netflix shows apparently do not opt for that.

> Pretty interesting. If you look on netflix approved camera list[0] there are none from Nikon.

I looked at that list and did some Googling, and it looks like Nikon just doesn't make video cameras like the other vendors. All they make are DSLRs that do a little bit of video.

This Quora answer (https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-main-differences-between-...) bluntly states; "Nikon has never sold a dedicated camcorder of any format."

Nikon also makes mirrorless cameras that do video a lot better than their DLSRs did (especially, for example, the Z9).

But, yes, they don't make dedicated camcorders...

Agreed, I hate the way a lot of their stuff looks. It's OK for TV but a lot of their film stuff looks sterile to me. I think that's part of why the Arri digital camera has a lot of fans.

I got my first Nikon camera a few years ago after all previous ones being Canon. At first I was a little taken aback by how things looked slightly smeared when you zoomed into the individual pixels...but I rapidly came to love it. Perhaps their sensors/glass are less 'perfect' but I love more of the pictures I take with it.

Nikon doesn't do video.

Referencing the Netflix approved vendor list is misleading, because they aren't in the cinematic video business.

Has anyone done an analysis into what gives Netflix shows that strange look? It is uncanny valley like for me, so I avoid them altogether. I assumed it must be a blend of camera choice, lighting, and post-processing, and its just awful.

Netflix is the minor leagues. People who do well there don't tend to stay there.

It’s the rushed post process. You can go on r/colourists and ask. You might be able to find some old posts from people who worked on these things explaining it.

It’s 100% not the camera. Portrait of a Lady on Fire was shot on RED. You can do virtually anything with digital cameras these days. Steve Yedlin proved he could make digital look like film beyond anyone’s ability to distinguish them.

Netflix just rushes everything so it’s all a similar level of not good.

It appears to me they accept many RED cameras?

https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...

I remember first watching 4k HDR films (I remember gemini man in particular) and it looked different from previous films and I had to adapt.

maybe too high res? Or maybe HDR eliminated artifacts like bloom or something that seemed to make it too perfect.

When the camera pans. I find it unnerving. I don’t enjoy watching that pixelated panning. I blame it on the digital recordings.

It might probably look better if they recorded it on film but no producer seems to be addressing my whimsical preferences

I think what you're seeing is due to bandwidth limitations: when the picture pans the info changes rapidly and places a bigger demand on the bandwidth, so streamed shows will suffer in quality and show pixelation. If this is what you're seeing, it has nothing to do with the content itself, it will be fine if you watch it directly from disk.

This. Digital video sends a key frame every N frame and deltas in between (well, slightly more complicated...) Lose a frame or two due to bandwidth and you see motion tearing.

I notice it on TV as well.

The Olympics are a live event, delaying the broadcast by days to cater to your niche nitpick about image quality would indeed be whimsical

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